Formula One prize fighters Vettel, Hamilton prepare for face-off

It has been a decade in the making, but Formula One finally has its prize fight. This time 10 years ago, Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel were the paddock’s wunderkinds: one of them fresh off an electrifying maiden season for McLaren, the other a German karting prodigy about to announce himself with the minor miracle of winning at Monza in a Toro Rosso. Now, in an F1 first, two quadruple world champions are squaring off in a straight duel for the sporting stratosphere.

Only a couple of men stand ahead of them on the all-time list: Juan Manuel Fangio and Michael Schumacher. When Fangio seized title No 5 at the Nurburgring in 1957, with a final triumph that many identified as his masterpiece, the exhausted Argentine reflected that it was the fastest he had ever driven. “I had reached,” he said, “the limit of my concentration and will to win.” When Schumacher achieved the same at Magny-Cours 45 years later, the effect was so anticlimactic and his Ferrari so dominant that even the Scuderia’s official history recorded his French Grand Prix victory as “not exactly the most thrilling”.

The arc of the 2018 campaign promises to be different. For a start, there is a legitimate contest, not just between two greats of their generation but two polar opposites as personalities: Hamilton the unabashed hedonist who would far rather spend an evening with Donatella Versace than attend another FIA function, and Vettel the introvert so fiercely protective of his private life that few can say for certain whether he is married or how many children he has.

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Such distinctions could be gauged simply by their responses to the glammed-up gridwalk in Austin last October, when F1 owner Liberty Media added an extra layer of theatre by enlisting boxing’s Michael Buffer as master of ceremonies. While Hamilton primped and preened as if accepting a Grammy Award, Vettel had the faraway stare of one who would have preferred to be watching his beloved Monty Python films.

For a while last year, the pair gave a cloying display of mutual reverence, thanking each other for the quality of each other’s overtakes in Barcelona.

It took just a few seconds in Baku, where they almost came to physical blows after banging wheels behind a safety car, for that facade of bonhomie to fracture, as Hamilton described Vettel’s antics as “disgusting”. “If he wants to prove that he is a man, then maybe he should do it out of the car, face-to-face,” he muttered.

It is no accident that Liberty’s breathless one-minute advert for next Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix features a snapshot of two drivers having a punch-up. For it is this type of simmering tension that elevates F1 for a mass audience far more than any talk of oil-burning regulations or Pirelli’s hypersoft tyres.

And it is the fair-weather fan that F1 should be most keenly courting, if it is to justify commercial director Sean Bratches’s claims that the sport sits on the same plane as the Olympics or the World Cup. For now, the Hamilton-Vettel dynamic can hardly be placed in the same bracket as, say, Senna-Prost. The two have never raced for the same team and are never likely to, with Hamilton poised to negotiate a three-year, Stg120 million (NZ$232m) contract extension at Mercedes that is expected to be his last.

Given Ferrari’s alarming implosion late last season, the battle between them has yet to be tested in a final-race face-off. Never, though, has F1 enjoyed the spectacle of two such decorated drivers on the same grid. The imperative in 2018 is that their performances match their pedigree.

We can be assured, at least, that their cars will be blisteringly quick.

James Allison, the Mercedes technical director, has described with relish how the Silver Arrows’ newly minted W09 – the big sister to the “diva-like” W08 that propelled Hamilton to glory last year – would crush its predecessor with ease. For the sake of healthy competition, it must be hoped that the huge gap that Mercedes opened up on the field in winter testing is not mirrored with a waltz to maximum points at Albert Park next Sunday.

To sustain wider interest, the reigning four-time champions need to be kept honest both by Ferrari and Red Bull, who suggested a return to form amid the dying embers of the 2017 season with two wins in four starts for Max Verstappen.

The machinery will also have a distinct look, now that the FIA has acquiesced to safety demands by mandating a ‘halo’ shield around the cockpit of each car. In a briefing at the Royal Automobile Club last week, Jean Todt, the FIA’s president, produced a letter signed by Vettel and Jenson Button in 2015, urging F1 to do more to protect drivers’ heads when racing at over 350kmh. The result is the fishbone-like halo design, so aesthetically dubious that Mercedes’ Toto Wolff has said that he would remove it “with a chainsaw” if given the chance.

Todt is plainly not impressed by such responses. Asked about Wolff’s remark, the Frenchman said: “It is a childish game. It’s very inappropriate, whoever you are, to deny publicly something that is introduced. Last year, around the world, we had 42 fatalities in motor racing. It’s unacceptable.”

Australia, then, promises to provide a fascinating litmus test of F1’s future. The traditional curtain-raiser, with its dramatic fighter-jet fly-pasts and its beachfront ambience, is regarded as a template for other city venues by Liberty, which is looking at adding further races in Miami, Argentina and Vietnam for 2019. These exotic backdrops need compelling sporting drama, though, if they are to work to their fullest effect.

Melbourne’s parkland circuit does not tend to produce sustained wheel-to-wheel action – the best race of recent memory came in 2013, when Kimi Raikkonen won for Lotus – but it should tell us much about where the latest instalment of Hamilton versus Vettel is heading. For so long a slow-burner, theirs is a rivalry that, for the good of the sport, now needs to explode.

Source :Stuff.co.nz

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